Tag Archives: RMLS

I have been reading a lot lately from people talking about pricing. Homes are only less subjective than art and collectibles. What is the White House worth? I got into an online discussion with an appraiser from the Southwest. He believed that only a licensed appraiser can determine the value of a home. Asking a Realtor®, in his opinion, was like asking your tax attorney to take care of your divorce. Sure. This from an industry that only needs three comparables to justify a price. Continue reading →

Seth Godin had a post about the damage that can be done by asking. Real estate is a slightly different situation where people don’t get a chance to connect usually and it is a “cold” request. Seller’s can take low offers personally which I have seen many times. Low ball offers in this case are unreasonably low offers just to get the seller to come down. Sometimes they reject the offer, other times they accept begrudgingly, not giving up anything on the inspection. What low-ball Continue reading →

After opening up the search page you can toggle to search for short sales and foreclosure homes. It uses keywords and an algorithm to pick them out of the RMLS. Another fun search that should yield a list of motivated sellers is this one. You can search by days listed and, this one surprises me, you can search by the price drops. Transparency grows and grows in real estate. Nothing proves this point more than the recent decision of the RMLS to allow addresses to Continue reading →

Finally we have a true number for days on the market. As long as a house is relisted within 31 days of it’s previous listing it will resume accumulating days but will not count the days that it was expired. So that is all to explain why August 2007 had 56 days on the market but August 2008 had 121 days on the market, which seems much more realistic. Click here for the complete Portland Metro Area Market Action pdf to see your neighborhood market Continue reading →

I wrote a post a couple of days ago about how interest rates were bobbing around erraticly. If you look to the left you will see the interest rate graph with the current drop. Hopefully the market will stabilize and fear in the market will subside some. This could be great news but we need to give it a few weeks to see how the market asbsorbs the information as it is it’s own beast. From Seth Harris at Northwest Metro Mortgage, Many of you Continue reading →

I love map based searching. I like to see exactly what is in an area and sometimes it is mind boggling how many homes are for sale in one place. After trying a few demos and getting helpful feedback from past and current clients I have chosen what I think is a great service, hopefully most of you agree. Poke around and let me know what you think.